Friday, May 28, 2010

Flowers and Plants

This week we learned all about Flowers and Plants.

We made flowers as shown in this tutorial on Family Fun.com, Flower Pins and clips . Then we put a green pipecleaner through the gap of the center and petals and through the back and twisted. See the ones on the right?

I made the girls small (4" by 8") sketchbooks, and we went outside and drew flowers from our yard and the bouquets from my hospital visit. I asked the girls questions about each flower (what shape are the petals? How many rows of petals are there? What shape is the center? what color is it?) to guide their drawing.

We also played flower shop. We used the felt flowers from the previous day, and our cash register. We role played how to buy something.

I also made up a price list so we could review pennies, dimes, and quarters, and do some simple math as we rang each other up.

Yesterday we made these Flower garlands as seen on frugal family fun blog. Sophia (5 years) was able to do most of the steps for making the flowers, I did most of Natalie's.

We also learned the parts of flowers and plants, and put these white daisies in food coloring water to see if the stems work.

One day later- Voila! The stems suck up the water into the flower. The blue worked best, all of the dyes with yellow (green, yellow, orange) turned out just yellow. Weird. We did 20 drops of food coloring, I'd suggest more.

We also planted wheat in pantyhose, added dirt, stuck in a cup. They're known as grassheads. Homemade chia pets is what I think of. This way day one, from tuesday. They've already started growing grass up about 1/2 inch. So they're quick.

And another planting experiment, we put beans in ziplocs with wet paper towels. When the bean breaks open and starts to grow, hopefully we'll see roots and stem and the original seed.

Some good music for flowers and plants: Oats and Beans and Barley by Raffi, and the LDS children's songbook spring songs. We sing "Once there was a little seed" instead of Snowman too.

For books- It's Pumpkintime! by Zoe Hall, Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert, and Little Seed by Eric Carle. For our book time we looked at Plants and Flowers and Seeds in our "Millenium Family Encyclopedia" by DK publishing.